Now another thing to understand about the Holy Names: They are purifying, they clean away all the garbage in the mind, in the heart, and they alone are able to do this.
So when we began our meditation sat, we sit down, ok I am going to do Gauranga, and we start chanting Gauranga.
We are coming from our material activities, and all the material surroundings, and our material situations, and problems, whatever. It has been our focus, we are coming from that, it is in our mind. Maybe we are nervous because of it, anxiety, all kinds of results from our material contact.
So we sit down to chant our Gauranga mantra, and we start saying Gauranga. And all this stuff is just coming up, you know, just like trying to chant Gauranga, and thinking about this, and feeling like that, and worried, and whatever. And it is not easy to continue to chant Gauranga, and after a short time, almost struggling with it, I get the message, ‘oh my God’, my feeling ‘that is enough; ok you did it, that is enough, lets stop’.
But if we have some understanding how everything works, and how it should be, we can understand with our intelligence no, no no, do not stop. Now is the time to keep going. So if we continue, gradually things get easier, we get more peaceful, more relaxed, the mantra starts becoming more attractive and it is now changed to the point ‘I do not want to stop’. So it has gone from let us stop to I do not want to stop. From I am not attracted to, well, this is nice, I am attracted. But I have to reach that point.
Maybe some of you, maybe all of you have experienced jogging, running or some other sport. We will use jogging as an example. So you start the jog. It is not so easy, you know, you are starting to breathe heavier, you know, you kind of like feeling a little bit tired, cannot get going. And the easiest thing to do is just stop. Let’s just stop, it is good enough, you know, that is good enough.
But of course if you keep going, for whatever reason you do, maybe your athletic coach is saying ‘no, keep going, one more lap’, whatever the reason, and you keep going, things start getting easier, and pretty soon you start to enjoy it, and pretty soon you are not even doing it, it is just happening, and you are just riding along. It is like a completely different experience.
But you had the goal long enough to reach that. If you stop when you start getting a little tired or through any persuasion, you never experience that. So many people that, you know, do not really run, say after even a little run or jog, ‘I hate running’. But then you look at the people who every day get up and love to run, they have a completely different experience.
Because they know something about running which that person does not. And of course, as a result their physical health improves, and often times their mental condition is a little more settled, and so on.